Walk Boldly Into the Future: Burberry Streams Show Tomorrow Live In 3D

Before Avatar, there were, of course, scores of 3-D movies—It Came From Outer Space (1953) and Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982) are two that come immediately to mind. But tomorrow marks the first time in history that a fashion show will be broadcast in 3-D, and you don’t have to speak Na’vi, the language on James Cameron’s moon Pandora, to know that with this stereoscopic move Burberry is taking interactive fashion to a whole other dimension. The plan? At 4:00 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time, Burberry’s autumn/winter 2010/11 womenswear show will take place at the Chelsea College of Art in London and it will be live streamed in HD 3D to Burberry-designed screening spaces in New York, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo, and L.A. (in L.A. there will be a slight time delay). If you are watching on this side of the Atlantic, you will be amazed. If you are watching on the Britishside, you will see Burberry’s move as the natural next step for English TV watchers: The technology is also being used by Sky TV to broadcast 3-D rugby games in pubs. To create its 3-D fashion show Burberry has teamed with Sky TV, which has developed a kind of two-camera-in-one system that makes for insanely complex stereophonic broadcasts. You will have to wear glasses in the designated screening rooms, invitation only, but presumably Burberry will be distributing very cool glasses. (No invitation is necessary to watch at home in 2-D, and live streaming even in 2-D is still pretty cool.) Of course, once you start doing things in 3-D it is a slippery slope to holograms, and then next thing you know you can’t tell whether the raincoat Emma Watson is wearing is real or virtual. But Christopher Bailey, creative director of the company that was founded in 1856—a time when the telegraph seemed pretty cutting edge—says we should not be nervous. “I think there is an assumption that technology is somehow competing with reality,” he said in an E-mail while taking a break from the final details of his 3-D show preparation, “whereas for us, the two complement each other.”